Icons have been known for some time in association with address bars of browsers. In a typical application, an icon appears in an address bar in the form of a padlock, key, or other symbol suggesting security, whenever the visited website is configured as a secure website, such as with an https designation. In another application, icons appear as a proprietary logo, a trademark, a company brand, or as some other symbol suggesting the company of the website. For instance, the Yahoo!, Inc., website hosted at the URL (uniform resource locator) http:www.yahoo.com, for example, causes the display of an icon “Y!” in the address bar of the browser that is representative or identical to one of Yahoo!, Inc.'s trademarks. Also known in the art as “Favicons,” meaning favorite icons, the icons can also appear as a result of the designer of the website or by manipulation by users. They can further appear as icons in drop-down menus corresponding to bookmarks of “favorite” web pages, thereby providing users with visual cues for easy spotting when navigating the menus. They can even appear in tabbed document interfaces.
Regardless of application, all icons presently provide a visual indication relating exclusively to the host website. While some have functionality in the form of users being able to drop and drag them, into book-marked folders or “favorites” to create a link to the website (or particular web page), or “click” them to learn additional information, such as clicking on a padlock icon to learn about a secure website, none have additional functionality. None also have anything to do with the user visiting the website.
In that users often have many “roles,” such as in the context of an identity-managed computing environment in an employer's business (e.g., manager, employee, director, system administrator, etc.), users often need or desire to act in those roles when visiting various company resources, accessible regularly via a web browser. For instance, a user in the role of manager may need to access company-based computing applications to learn or investigate the financial pay information and benefits for direct-reporting employees. The same user may also have need to investigate the same application when in the role of employee to learn or investigate their own financial pay information and benefits. For at least this reason, the same user has multiple roles and multiple needs of visiting a common application. However, it is important for the user to understand what role they are in because inconvenience results if applications are visited when in the wrong role. For instance, users need to re-verify credentials or re-log-in, such as with username and password, to visit the application or website in a role different than their existing role, and this wastes time.
Accordingly, there is need in the art of user roles to readily cue or remind users of their present role. There is further need to do so in the context of visiting web sites or applications via browsers. To the extent icons are employed, functionality is important. It is also important that users have convenient mechanisms to change roles on the fly. In that many users already own and/or use a browser with an address bar for visiting web sites, it is further desirable to convert existing browsers to the type meeting the needs outlined above. Naturally, any improvements along such lines should further contemplate good engineering practices, such as relative inexpensiveness, stability, ease of implementation, low complexity, flexibility, etc.